Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Yasujirō Ozu | 一人息子 (Hitori musuko) (The Only Son)

the good son

by
Douglas Messerli

Tadao Ikedaand Masao Arata
(screenplay, based on a story by James Maki [Yasujirō Ozu]), Yasujirō
Ozu (director) 一人息子 (Hitori musuko) (The Only Son) / 1936

The
first image of Yasujirō Ozu’s 1936 talkie, The
Only Son, is a sentence, a kind of maxim: “Life’s tragedy begins with the
bond between parent and child,” which could, in fact, serve as a prelude to
nearly all of this great filmmaker’s works.

The next “scene” shows us the
hard-working widow, Tsune Nonomiya (Chōko Iida) at work in a silk production
factory in the rural town of Shinshū in 1923. When she returns home to her son,
Ryōsuke (Masao Hayama), apparently near the end of his elementary school
studies, he reports to her that many of his peers are going on to Middle
School, and it is clear that he would like to join them, while recognizing that
she is too poor to pay for his expenses. He also perceives that his future in
the rural outpost in which he lives is going to be bleak.

Ryōsuke’s
teacher Ōkubo (Chishū Ryū) also stops by the house, revealing his happiness
that, as Ryōsuke has evidently told him, he will be going to Middle School in
Tokyo; he, too, is soon planning to return to Tokyo. It is important for the
child’s future, he argues, that the boy have further education.

When Ōkubo leaves, Ryōsuke is punished
for his lie, but his mother realizes the truth of the teacher’s words, and is
pleased by her son’s desire to continue his education. And she soon relents,
saying she will simply find a way to make it happen.

The film suddenly shifts to Toyko,
thirteen years later, to a scrappy suburb of the city, where Ryōsuke works as a
night-school teacher, hardly making enough to feed his wife and new baby. After
all these years, Tsune has saved up enough money to visit him, and when she
arrives, you can see her disappointment about the location of her son’s modest
home, and her surprise and hurt that he has not told her that he is married and
has a baby. But, like the visiting parents in Ozu’s masterful Tokyo Story, she swallows her pain, and expresses
her joy in finding a new daughter-in-law and grandson.

Ryōsuke (now played by Himori Shin’ichi)
quickly borrows money from friends in order to buy dinner and a pillow for his
mother, while knowing that he will have a difficult time paying it back and
realizing that it is several days from his paycheck.

In order to entertain his mother, he
takes her to a movie (a talkie), the first she has ever seen, and together they
visit several public shrines. But she, tired from activities, seems
disinterested in the film, and quickly falls asleep. The next day, they together
visit his former teacher, now running a tonkatsu restaurant, his own dreams of
becoming a professor also clearly having been dashed.

That evening, with little money left,
Ryōsuke and his wife introduce the older woman to the Chinese-style Ramen noodles
which the poor eat.

While touring with her in the neighborhood
the next morning, he sits in a field with her, admitting his own sense of
disappointment and defeat. It is very difficult, he explains, to survive in
such a large urban environment. For the first time, during her visit, she
outwardly chides him, angry for his being such a defeatist (while not openly
expressing what we know, that part of her anger surely is that she has herself
given up so much for her son). She admits that she has been forced to sell
their home, and has for years been living in a factory tenement.

Out of money, the married couple try to
imagine how they might continue to entertain Tsune; but Ryōsuke’s wife reveals that they have some
more money since she has just sold her kimono, and the family plans to spend
the day together enjoying city life.

In their neighborhood, however, a young
boy playing under and around a horse, is kicked and must have immediate medical
attention. The family cancels their plans and help to rush the neighbor’s boy
to the hospital. The boy will survive, but will need weeks of attention.
O-Tusne observes her son quietly handing over the envelope of money Ryōsuke has
planned to use for their outing to the boy’s father to help with the child’s
medical bills. She later tells him what she has seen and praises his kind act.

Now, having seen, so to speak, “how
things are,” she is ready to return to her village and job. Before she leaves,
Ryōsuke promises her that he will find a way to return to school in order to
find a better job as a teacher.

And back in Shinshū we see her gossiping
with a friend about how proud she is of her successful son, so pleased with him
that she can now die happy.

Yet Ozu’s last shot of her, as we see her
sitting alone during a break, we see her gazing sadly into the future. And we
can only wonder whether Ryōsuke will be able to keep his promise or ever find a
better job.

Many of Ozu’s works are bittersweet,
just as the film I mentioned earlier, Tokyo
Story. But The Only Son, made
when Ozu returned to film-making after to the Japanese-Sino War, seems
particularly bitter. For all the “good” people of this film cannot find the
lives that they deserve, and suffer, so it seems, for all the others who
somehow found a way to get ahead. If nothing else, the unjust society in which
they find themselves is unable to reward all their hard work. It now sounds so
familiar.